Docker acquires SDN startup SocketPlane

At Socketplane we started out as four guys with a collectively strong belief in open source and open communities. We aligned around a shared vision that we wanted to be a critical part of Docker’s once in a decade disruption. Now that we are part of the Docker team, we couldn’t be happier.

We never looked to hedge our bets, our success was and obviously still is tied to the success of Docker. While there are many reasons that we decided to join the team, first and foremost Docker is unlike any other projects we have worked on in the past; the focus on user experience and simplicity is unmatched. Our early work with Docker during the open network design sprints gave us clear indications that the Docker maintainers were interested in being good open source stewards for the networking community in a project with an already staggering community of users and contributors. We also saw a genuine desire from Docker leadership to do right by both, individual contributors and the ecosystem. That made it all the more easy to jump in head first.

The majority of users want networking to just work, but just as importantly, integrate into their existing networks. Focusing on a “batteries included but swappable” approach, addresses a fair amount of well known simple deployments that developers care about. This enables opportunity for partners and ecosystem to address their customer use-cases.

Being part of Docker allows us to continue to collaborate with partners that have shown early interest in Docker networking including but not limited to: Cisco, IBM, Joyent, Microsoft, Rancher, VMware and Weave. Our explicit focus is to lead the collaboration around a rich set of APIs that will empower these partners to create enterprise-class networking solutions that will further drive the adoption of multi-container, multi-host distributed applications.